Cover story: Precision Slurry Alpine Buildings

Alpine Buildings has designed and produced a functional base of operations for effluent application specialist Precision Slurry, with space, aesthetics, and the future in mind

Glen Crafar’s purpose-built Alpine shed is more than just a building — it’s a reminder that his business, Precision Slurry, now requires a custom-built base of operations to cater for its rapid growth. It needs a space to maintain and engineer new and existing equipment and machinery and provide a comfortable space for future employees as the business picks up speed.

Talking effluent

Glen and wife Paula are dairy farmers, milking 800 cows on 241 hectares at Reporoa, south of Rotorua.

Glen grew up in Reporoa and knows the area like the back of his hand. He knows the region, too, and around eight years ago, he and Paula — along with Glen’s brother Robert — decided to take their tongue-in-cheek reputation as ‘shit stirrers’ to the next level.

“We could see the need for a quality dairy effluent application specialist that could stir and spread effluent from ponds, bladders, and other effluent facilities around the Central Plateau region,” Glen says.

Precision Slurry grew rapidly, evolving from those first few conversations in 2015 to a successful business that has been run from the home farm for the past eight years.

The business covers the Central North Island, Bay of Plenty, and South Waikato.
Its clients are mostly local farmers, but it also undertakes some factory waste work and work for the Western Bay of Plenty Council.

While both brothers and Paula are keenly involved in the business, Robert has taken the role of operations manager.

The business uses state-of-the-art equipment and machinery to manage their customers’ effluent, all the while working within effluent management plans and advising best practices based on their many years of experience.

“We take yesterday’s grass and put it back onto the paddocks,” Glen says.

“Traditionally, effluent has been an underutilised asset on a lot of dairy farms. It’s essentially tonnes of free fertiliser and when stirred and applied well, the benefits and cost savings are huge.”

“And, having grown up on a dairy farm, we have experience of what works and what doesn’t. That knowledge and our engineering skills really help us when we need to solve a problem for someone.”

As befits an engineer’s business, Precision Slurry’s machinery cache is impressive: four Fendt 900 series tractors and a Claas Xerion tractor.

But it’s the effluent tankers, in particular, that would inspire a satisfied nod from the most hard-nosed dairy farmer: a 27 cubic metre Veenhuis slurry tanker and a 30 cubic metre Kotte Garant pump application tanker — the only of its kind in New Zealand.

“We got it for its agility as a large tanker and for increased safety on slopes with better traction — and so far, so good,” Glen says. They also use seven-metre and 12-metre Storth Mega Mix stirrers and a SlurryKat propeller stirrer.

With rapid growth on the horizon — and large machinery to accommodate — Glen took a thorough approach to researching the best building that would not only serve the business now but heading into the future with its infinite possibilities.

The wish list

After many years of mulling over various building concepts and configurations, Glen decided Alpine would be the best company for the job.

“I’d been looking for a while at different configurations,” Glen says. “I wanted to get the most value out of the build, and Alpine had some great ideas. I loved the look and the tidiness of the Alpine sheds I had seen.”

Glen was keen to build a pole shed, as there was less likelihood of having to excavate the site and repack it at huge cost and inconvenience.

“With a pole shed, the poles go down two metres and act as footings,” Glen says. “We were also lucky that it’s pretty solid ground down here.”

For Glen, the size of the shed was everything. “I wanted a good free span area; as much as I could afford,” he says. “I wanted a space that was functional, tidy, and free of clutter, as the idea was to keep the building clear most of the time.

“However, it needed to be large enough to bring the machinery inside when required and to shut the doors.”

As Glen and Robert are keen engineers, they wanted two to three bays to be able to work on different projects when required while still being able to perform maintenance and adjustments on the hard-wearing effluent machinery.

In November 2021, the Crafars had a meeting with Alpine to start the design process.

“Alpine had some good ideas on width and building configuration,” Glen says. “We worked with Rogan Rountree on the design process, and later, we worked with Scott Ackroyd as the build progressed. They were both great.”

Glen’s friend Mark Wynyard (Wynyard Building Company) took on the role of builder and project manager and was pleased to discover that collaborating with Alpine was straightforward.

“If Mark had a question, Alpine had the answer straightaway,” Glen says. “Mark was impressed with the clarity of the plans and the process.”

The build

In May 2022, the kitset arrived on-site, and over the following year, Mark and the Crafar brothers chipped away at the project. In May 2023, a party was held
to celebrate the shed being ready to move into.

On viewing the shed, it’s obvious to see that Glen’s requirement for space was well-heeded. The gable area of the shed is 20 x 30 metres, including six bays five-metre wide.

“The length of the shed is perfect,” Glen says. “We couldn’t have gone any smaller — the Garant Kotte can only just fit in the building with the doors down.”

The walls are 5.5-metre high, up to 7.4-metre at the apex. The building is clearspan, with three hot zinc-sprayed Alpine steel rafters.

When it came to the natural evolution of the building, it was no problem for Alpine to adjust the plans to accommodate features that Glen wanted to include.

“Originally, the building was intended to be one big open shed, but we decided to add two internal walls to future-proof the building,” Glen says.

A separate space now exists that will contain an office, staffroom, bathroom, and kitchenette to accommodate future employees, as well as storage for their cars (“my investment portfolio”, Glen says) and a mezzanine-floor ‘man-cave’.

They also tweaked the initial interior storage plans: what was meant to be a separate storage room is now an open machine workshop in the corner of the gabled area.

Twelve sheets of industrial-grade clearlight provide substantial natural light inside the building, five 4.2 x 4.9-metre-high shutter roller doors allow access to the outdoor, and two 6 x 30-metre-long lean-tos that run along the front and back of the gable area.

The lean-to bays are 10-metre wide and up to 5.4-metre high and constructed with steel boxed-in purlins and 12 sheets of industrial-grade clear light.

“The combination of the roller doors and the lean-tos is a valuable feature to have to aid airflow in a number of situations,” Glen says. “We can have the doors open when things get a bit dusty, even on a rainy day, and the rain doesn’t come in the shed.

“The lean-tos were a bit of an afterthought, but they are so good. Everyone who sees them says they wish they had put them on their own sheds.”

Glen is in the process of converting half of the lean-tos into secure outside storage to keep the interior of the building clear. 

When it came to designing the building, making sure it was aesthetically pleasing as well as functional was important to Glen.

Externally, the shed cladding is the new Denim Blue colour steel.

“I had seen the colour scheme on various buildings — houses and some sheds — and it was quite neat,” Glen says.

For the doors and roof, zinc alume was used in place of Colorsteel.

“By using zinc alume, we were able to transfer some of the budget to some more functional features of the build while still getting a tidy and hard-wearing finish,” Glen says.

The interior of the building has a similarly neat and tidy finish. The interior walls are lined with plywood with negative detailing, the idea for which is a credit to Mark, Glen says.

“Wood is so much nicer to look at than steel,” Glen says. “And with no shelves, there’s nowhere for dust to catch.”

The end result

The completed building is just what Glen and Robert had in mind when they started out in this process — a spacious, tidy base that allows their growing business room to move.

“Our business is ready to grow and expand, and now we have the facilities and base to do that,” Glen says. “It has been so good to separate the business from the farm; we’re pleased with our decision to build at the other end of the farm and not up by the cowshed as we initially thought we would.

“The idea is to subdivide this piece of land and create a separate entity, which will not only increase the value of the land the shed is on but it will also future-proof both businessess going forward.”

Glen says he cannot fault Alpine’s professionalism, quality, and customer support throughout the design and build process.

“Alpine was really good to work with,” he says. “There was good communication and great plans. It was a big undertaking to build the project ourselves, but everything was in the kit — it was all there, and all correct.”

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Photography: Peter Young